Dumb/Moron In ’12
November 25, 2010 2 Comments
I think part of what’s lurking underneath the whole great Palin debate of 2008-201? is a tacit dispute over the role of government, and of the President in particular.
It’s occurred to me that part of the reason this idea that the President need necessarily be “smart” offends me so much is that I fundamentally don’t want the Presidency to be of a size and scope as to require “smartness” in the first place. Put another way, if the position of U.S. President can only be done by the “smart” (which I don’t think is the case, but even if it were), then we’re doing it wrong and need to redefine the President’s powers and responsibilities accordingly. Perhaps rooting for a “dumb” person to be President is a way of forcing the issue – or calling the left’s bluff.
The Presidency was never meant to be a position of national smarty-pants who knows everything and controls everything via the Washington DC control room. George Washington was not this sort of President; indeed, I suspect if he were around today, the left would be aghast at his “dumbness”. In fact the biographies of most of the better of our Presidents would be chock full of family connections, luck, a certain industriousness and character strength in the better ones – but conspicuously lacking in “smart”. And meanwhile it’s hard to ignore the fact that Barack Obama, a complete empty suit whose ideas are all cribbed from various Marxist mentors and whose tangible accomplishments amount to diddly fucking squat worth mentioning, passes muster as “smart”. This alone should make it clear that “smart” is a fucked-up metric by which to be judging anyone.
That is why I say: Dumb/Moron in ’12!
I’ll go you one better: I bet if you got all the previous presidents in a room and slapped an IQ test on them, there’d be a noticeable correlation between “brainiacs” and “crappy presidents.” The best presidents, I’d wager – the Lincolns and the Washingtons — weren’t all that bright, but they did have the great gift of being able to read and manage people. This gift a) doesn’t noticeably correlate with intelligence, in my experience, and b) also requires a good deal of humility to use effectively, which our Ivy-educated betters, trained from infancy to believe that they are intellectual giants, simply don’t have.
On the other hand, the indisputably high-IQ types — Wilson and Jefferson come to mind — were chock full of awful ideas. Seriously: Thomas Jefferson, for instance, loved the French Revolution and thought Robespierre was great. It’s a sad fact of nature that high IQ tends to come bundled with political stupidity — even scientists who spend too long in a university tend to become idiot left-wingers, although their necessary grounding in physical reality keeps them safer for longer.
Jefferson also got nearly a doubling of the size of the US and a removal of France from the CONUS as a significant power at a fairly bargain price. So I’m not inclined to judge him quite so harshly. Coolidge was probably my favorite president though.